FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT STALIN - PAGE 5

Russian authorities may still be holding an American citizen long incarcerated by the former Soviet regime, Moscow officials acknowledged here earlier this week. The revelation was made in top-secret Communist Party and KGB documents that go on view Wednesday at the Library of Congress. They are part of an archive of more than 100 million party and secret-police files that Russian President Boris Yeltsin opened to the public after the failure of the Soviet military coup attempt in August.

By Reviewed by Harvey Pekar, An author whose most recent book, co-written with Joyce Brabner, is "Our Cancer Year." | October 15, 1995

The Master and Margarita By Mikhail Bulgakov Translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor Ardis, 367 pages, $35 The various Russian/Soviet avant-garde movements produced a plethora of great modernist writers--Bely, Blok, Khlebnikov, Mandelstam, Zamyatin, probably more great modernists from 1890 to 1935 than any nation. Their writing was so quickly suppressed by Stalin, however, that much of it was not translated and made available to the world's reading public.

A fundamental problem in international relations today, and a growing one, is the inability or unwillingness of people in public affairs to consider the events of another period in the context of the beliefs and prejudices of that time. They judge people of another time according to the attitudes of today. There may be valid criticisms to be made of periods when values were less tolerant than ours, or rested on more prejudice or ignorance, but the actions of people at that time have to be judged in the context of that ignorance and prejudice, and not in terms of the more extensive or complex knowledge that exists today.

Under Stalin the Soviet film industry was home to artists who, if they were lucky, propagandized for the party yet managed to sneak in a few sly touches amid the paeans to hard work, mass production and the communist ideal. "Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova, First Lady of Soviet Cinema" presents a five-film retrospective of Stalin's favorite actress, and at least one of the pictures -- a fascinating hammer-and-sickle version of the Cinderella fairy tale, from 1940 -- holds up extremely well.

Two prominent Bolshevik revolutionaries who have long been denigrated in the Soviet Union have re-emerged as characters in a play that authorities have allowed to be published. The two men, Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, were associated with Lenin in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but were ousted by Stalin from the Soviet leadership in the 1920s. The play, "The Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk," by Mikhail Shatrov, was written in 1962 during Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign, but has only now been approved for publication.

Junius Scales, who in the postwar anti-communist fervor was the only American sent to prison for being a member of the Communist Party, died Monday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 82. Mr. Scales died of heart failure and the effects of a stroke, said his daughter, Barbara. With his privileged Southern upbringing, Mr. Scales was an unlikely communist. He joined the Communist Party in 1939 while he was at the University of North Carolina, saying he saw in the party an opportunity to right the wrongs done to blacks and other poor working people.

Nearly 1,500 Lithuanian Americans rallied at the Lithuanian World Freedom Center in Lemont Sunday to ask one thing of President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev as they prepare for their upcoming summit: "Let my people go." The words were quoted by 75-year-old Joseph D. Jansonas of Brighton Park. And it was the message he heard from nearly a dozen federal and state elected officials who took the podium Sunday to say they think the Kremlin's crackdown on Lithuania is more than an internal affair of the Soviet government.

Not every mystery needs to be solved, but something there is that makes human beings persist in asking: What really happened? This urge to accuracy (or perverse disbelief, if you prefer) dogs sleeping lies, yielding rectification of the historical record. Lately this phenomenon has disturbed the lies that slept behind what used to be the Iron Curtain. Its meltdown has been good for revelation. Witness the Soviet admission to the Katyn forest massacre, the disclosure of Stalin's brutality and Mikhail Gorbachev's acknowledgment of error explicit in the new open-arms attitude toward those, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who were expelled from the USSR.

No government in history has inflicted as much suffering, brutality and bloodshed on its own people as the one that has ruled the Soviet Union since 1917. But for 70 years, the czars of Bolshevism did all they could to suppress every record of their crimes. The demands of memory, however, finally prevailed over the convenience of ideology. One reason communism is disintegrating is that a few brave Soviet citizens refused to let their neighbors and the world forget their sorrowful history.

For those who want the International Theatre Festival of Chicago to begin early there's some fascinating foreign fare that begins next week. The Studio Theatre of Moscow-Southwest was a big hit last year when it brought "Hamlet" to the University of Illinois at Chicago. Now the Russians are returning with three more offerings. On Thursday they present "Moliere" by famed comic writer Mikhal Bulgakov (author of "My Life As a Dog"), a Stalin-era satire about the fate of writers under an autocratic and capricious patron (Bulgakov meant to finger Stalin but obviously could not name him)